Recent news here.

December 26, 2005 - In the fourth centennial of Don Quixote, we send you Christmas greetings from the foot of the windmills.

December 23, 2005 - Christmas time is here again, and with it, our famous Annual Christmas Luncheon. This year it was Brazilian food. Tasty.

November 29, 2005 - The Eicosanoid Research Division website moves today to a new webhost. Our previous host, Retecal, will shortly go out of business. It is fair to acknowledge that Retecal provided an outstanding service for the two and a half years we were with them.

November 15, 2005 -  Like St. Albert, saint of the day, today's news is great. Olimpio Montero has been promoted to the scientific scale of the Spanish Research Council, and thus becomes the fourth faculty member of the Eicosanoid Research Division.

November 11, 2005 - A new banner presides over the site. This banner, more in the spirit of older ones, uses a sea dawn image for the background (thanx for the pic, Bill). The previous banner featured the Madrid night sky, and can be found here.

November 10, 2005 - The research support history of our division, past and present, has been added to the site. This info is also accessible from a link on the bottom of the Research page.

November 2, 2005 - Today, Martín Valdearcos joins the Eicosanoid Research Division. Martín is our first non-Castilian grad student, as he hails from Andalusia.

October 19, 2005 -  A mini-symposium titled "Atherogenesis and Metabolic Disorders. From Genetic Alterations to Pathogenic Mechanisms" was organized here in Valladolid by our colleague Mariano Sánchez Crespo, as a part of the XXIV Meeting of the Spanish Society of Clinical Biochemistry and Molecular Pathology. Since there is always a first time, or so they say, Jesús Balsinde spoke about Lipidomics.

October 4, 2005 - We've got Eicosanoid Baby #3! Yesterday, Yolanda gave birth to a baby boy, her second child. The baby's name will be Héctor.

October 3, 2005 - The local newspaper El Día de Valladolid published an interview with Jesús Balsinde about Alzheimer's Disease and prostaglandins (in Spanish).

September 20-24, 2005 - The 46th ICBL Meeting was held in Corsica, France. Great conference, great venue, and also a great opportunity to meet old friends we had not seen in a long time.

September 1, 2005 - We welcome David Balgoma, a graduate student, as a new member of the Eicosanoid Research Division.

August 17, 2005 - We just received communication that two private foundations, Fundación Mario Losantos del Campo and Fundación La Caixa, have resolved to fund our lipidomics research for the next three years. As Col. Hannibal Smith so eloquently put it, we love it when a plan comes together.

July 19, 2005 - Move of the Eicosanoid Research Divison to the new IBGM building was completed today. People say they love the new facilities.

June 22, 2005 - The new IBGM building was inaugurated yesterday by the Minister of Education and Science. Many big fishes of the scientific and local scene, including the President of the Spanish Research Council and the Rector Magnificus of the University of Valladolid, attended the event. Everything was so pretty, but the building is to remain unoccupied for at least one more month. Getting on to the important stuff, food was scarce.

May 27, 2005 - It took time, but we all finally got together for the complete 2005 Eicosanoid Research Division Group Picture. Take a look at it here.

May 24, 2005 - Just another facelift for the site, version 4.3. The front page has been re-designed again, and different kinds of images have been added in every section. Following up on the Jan 18 entry, one could well say that we finally found a bright spot for Pablo de Valladolid, a.k.a. "the most astonishing piece of painting ever done" (Edouard Manet dixit), in the Introduction page.

May 6, 2005 - Coda to yesterday's entry: despair not, ye olde folks, for our Division counts with the talent of two people --María Balboa and Violeta Ruipérez-- who received their degrees from Spain's #1 University!

May 5, 2005 - The El Mundo newspaper made public its annual appraisal of the best Universities in Spain. Universities from Madrid and Barcelona dominate the ranking, with the Autonomous University of Madrid taking the hot spot. No surprise there. What may result a bit surprising for some is that, for all its past glory, the University of Valladolid did not make it to the list. Food for thought.

May 2, 2005 - The following is an excerpt from the beautiful Pixar short Boundin' which may or may not have something to do with our institute and its circumstance: "sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down. When you find that you're down, well, just look around, you still got a body, good legs and fine feet, get your head in the right place and, hey, you're complete". We earnestly agree that it's nice to know that there are Jackalopes around.

April 29, 2005 - The bothering issue of dead links in the Publications section has been on-going for several months. This was due to an irresoluble problem with the server where the files were stored. The files have now been moved to the much more reliable I3U server, which should put and end to this matter.

April 20, 2005 - Following up on the March 28 entry below, the I3U website is finally on-line. Any similarity of that site to this one may not be purely coincidental. Usual lurkers please note that the I3U is primarily intended as a CSIC people thing. A permanent link to the I3U website has been placed on the bottom of the Introduction page.

April 19, 2005 - Another facelift for the site, version 4.2. The front page has been re-designed in a much less verbose manner. The previous front page has morphed into a new section, Introduction, which is accessible from the navigation menu on the left. Instead of the classical arachidonate and prostaglandin G2 structures, the front page now features a rotating arachidonate molecule, courtesy of our grad student José Pindado.

April 14, 2005 - To make life more difficult for spammers, all e-mail links in this website have been removed. E-mail addresses are now displayed as image files. As far as we know, e-mail collector bots cannot extract information from images. As a minor downside, now you will have to double-check the spelling when manually entering our addresses in the To: field of your e-mail client.

March 28, 2005 - The two research labs of the Eicosanoid Research Division have entered into a strategic alliance with four other groups of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics. This has resulted in the creation of the Innate Immunity & Inflammation Unit (I3U), which will soon incorporate as a research department of the Spanish Research Council in Valladolid. A website for the I3U is in progress.

March 25, 2005 - Good Friday, huge thing here in Valladolid. Returning to the place this section should have never abandoned, a.k.a. science, we would like to highlight the very recent work by Adam Sapirstein and co-workers demonstrating that cytosolic group IVA phospholipase A2 (cPLA2) regulates cyclooxygenase-2 expression in mouse brain. These studies take advantage of the cPLA2 knock-out mice, and thus provide genetic evidence for the sequential model of regulation of cyclooxygenase-2 induction by cPLA2 products that we proposed a few years ago.

March 22, 2005 - It now appears that this humble website generates more interest among certain people than we ever expected. This entry is especially dedicated to them. Olimpio Montero and Alberto Sánchez Guijo are not lab technicians. They do not prepare buffer solutions, clean up glassware, or perform any other kind of technician service for us, almighty faculty personnel of the Eicosanoid Research Division. Olimpio and Alberto are in charge of equipment that lends service not to a few chosen ones, but to the whole Institute. However, destiny has it that the pieces of equipment that Olimpio and Alberto operate ultimately depend on the faculty personnel of the Eicosanoid Research Division. It is as simple as that. Everything else is gossip and distortion.

March 3, 2005 - Members of our division designed a mini-brochure for the Institute, to be used as our presentation card for some upcoming fair-like event. Not clear how long will the brochure be in use after said event, but that is okay; it was fun.

February 19, 2005 - The 2005 Official Group Picture of the Eicosanoid Research Division is here... incomplete, as not everyone was around at the time of taking the photograph. A complete pic may eventually follow.

February 11, 2005 - In the coming months the Institute is set to move to its own building, situated close to our present location in the Health Sciences Building, and also to the University Hospital. The building is still under construction. This picture was taken last week by our grad student Javi Casas. The laboratories of the Eicosanoid Research Division will be located in the upper floor along the building's longer side that is shown in the picture. The main entrance is in the opposite side.

February 4, 2005 - Sometimes it looks as though news pile up one on top of another, as this is the fourth entry in four straight days. Our long awaited toy (see Nov 15 entry) is finally a reality: a Bruker esquire6000 ion-trap mass spectrometer equipped with electrospray and atmospheric pressure chemical ionization sources, and interfaced with a Merck LacronElite high-performance liquid chromatograph. We are going to have much fun with this instrument.

February 3, 2005 - iPLA2, more than simply a terminator. This is the sharp title of a well-written comment on our latest JBC article that appears in the Dec 2004 issue of the Spanish Biochemical Society Bulletin. Something in our work must have caught the author's attention, since we did not submit any information or were asked about this. We thank the Society for the free exposure.

February 2, 2005 - Two inconsequential additions to yesterday's entry. First one is about the previous default font of this site, which was Verdana. Odd as it seems, a certain number of people may not have this font installed on their computers. Plus, some people claim that Verdana is a poor choice for web designers to specify. Second thing is for nostalgics. The old banner and front page layout can be found here.

February 1, 2005 - Effective today, the Eicosanoid Laboratory is no more. It has been split into two, one headed by Dr. Jesús Balsinde, and the other by Dr. Balboa. These two research labs, together with the Mass Spectrometry and Confocal Microscopy Research Facilities constitute the new Eicosanoid Research Division. In accordance with this exciting news, a resplendent new banner has been created, and some minor adjustments to the look of the site have been introduced, i.e. slight variations in the scheme of colors, and setting Arial as the default font. This is site version 4.1.

January 21, 2005 - Javier Casas, a graduate student, officially joins the Eicosanoid Laboratory today. He is also a grad student in the lab of Prof. Sánchez-Crespo, adjacent to ours, so this is like a joint appointment for him.

January 18, 2005 - The Contact page has been refurbished with pics of some singular buildings of Valladolid (churches, of course, we are in Castile). Our old friend Pablo de Valladolid, who was with us from the beginning, had to go. Gotta think where to place him now.

January 10, 2005 - More people for the the Eicosanoid Lab: Olimpio Montero, a Project Scientist of the Spanish Research Council, and José Pindado and Violeta Ruipérez, graduate students. Olimpio will be in charge of our spanking new mass spectrometry facility. By the way, our current designation as 'Eicosanoid Laboratory' is about to be changed soon.

January 4, 2005 - Happy New Year, folks. Last April, Jon Arm's group published a paper in JBC describing the Group V phospholipase A2 null mice (Satake et al., JBC 279: 16488-16499, 2004). These animals exhibit decreased eicosanoid production in response to innate stimuli of the immune response, and thus provide definitive proof to the work that we and others were conducting during the 90's in in vitro systems. This is the article we distinguish as the most influential in our area of research for the last twelve months and, therefore, select as Paper of the Year 2004.